Londa Schiebinger: 2026 Centennial Medal Citation
As the world’s leading authority on sex and gender in the history of science, Londa Schiebinger not only pioneered the study of women in science in the eighteenth century but also created an international platform that helps modern-day scientists use insights and methodologies from the humanities to innovate and improve the practice of scientific discovery today.
Schiebinger was an English major at the University of Nebraska and completed her PhD in history at Harvard in 1984. Her dissertation gave rise to two field-defining books: The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, in 1989, and Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, in 1993. With these books, Schiebinger brought to light the previously unexplored history of gender bias during the Scientific Revolution—including, for example, the gender politics behind Linnaeus’s choice of the term “Mammalia” to describe our biological class. Schiebinger has also examined the circulation and suppression of knowledge through her prize-winning book Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, in 2004, and Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, in 2017.
“Londa’s historical scholarship has given generations of scientists and students an evidence-based narrative that challenges myths about who belongs in science,” says Kari Nadeau, incoming dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “I see her intellectual legacy in the way we now routinely ask how sex, gender, and other factors shape exposures, vulnerabilities, and technological solutions, and in how we design fair and effective interventions and preventions.”
Evelynn Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, hails Schiebinger for her pioneering work in the field. “Londa was almost immediately recognized as a leading voice in the study of the history of women in science,” Hammonds says, “and her intersectional analyses of gender and the scientific enterprise have made her an internationally renowned scholar. Her work is deeply researched, methodologically innovative, and always addresses the most important questions about the ways in which scientific knowledge is gendered. She is a great scholar and a generous colleague.”
For more than two decades, Schiebinger has brought this pioneering spirit and innovative energy to her teaching and leadership at Stanford University, where she is John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project brings humanities analysis into the sciences—ensuring that considerations of sex, gender, and intersectionality can inform everything from the kind of questions scientists ask, to the way studies are designed, to how technology and therapies are developed—so that scientific work is more rigorous, relevant, and beneficial for everyone. Since 2009, Gendered Innovations has brought over 225 scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists together in a series of collaborative workshops to develop concrete methods and case studies that scientists can use directly in their work. These materials are publicly available on the project’s website, which has engaged more than 2.5 million unique users across 185 countries. Schiebinger has also been consulted as an expert multiple times by the United Nations, the European Commission, and the National Science Foundation, which have leveraged her work to help shape science policy and to require the integration of gender analysis into scientific research.
“It is extraordinarily rare for a historian to have the kind of impact on public life that Professor Schiebinger has achieved,” says Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, who describes Schiebinger as “a foundational figure in women’s and gender studies.” Chaplin adds, “Within the new field of agnotology—a branch of epistemology that investigates ignorance—it was Professor Schiebinger who identified it as not only an absence of knowledge, but often a deliberate suppression of knowledge, resulting from social and political inequalities. Her critical voice on gender, STEM, inclusion, and willed ignorance is a crucial one.”
Schiebinger has mentored and inspired many eminent scholars, including Sarah Richardson, Aramont Professor of the History of Science & Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, who describes Schiebinger as “a cherished mentor of mine.” “Londa is the leading scholar on women and gender in the history of science, and she has built a truly global conversation around gender bias in scientific knowledge that has driven policy change,” Richardson observes. “She unites the humanities, social sciences, and sciences through a truly unique skill set that she developed through iteration, trial and error, and experimentation. And she does it with aplomb.”
Londa Schiebinger, for your pathbreaking scholarship on the history of sex and gender during the Scientific Revolution, and for your visionary leadership of Gendered Innovations, which so powerfully leverages expertise in the humanities to improve the practice of science, we are proud to award you the 2026 Centennial Medal.
